AFP: Britain's finance minister calls for 'new deal' to wipe out world poverty

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Agence France Presse

March 24, 2006

Britain's finance minister calls for 'new deal' to wipe out world poverty

Britain's finance minister Gordon Brown, who is expected to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister, called Thursday for rich countries to strike a "new deal" with developing countries to end poverty.

Reviving the theme of fighting world poverty expounded at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland last July, Brown told fellow Labour Party members in Wales that poor countries must be "empowered" in trade, education and health care.

"We are talking about a new deal between the rich countries and poor countries of the world," Brown told Welsh Labour delegates in the city of Swansea.

The chancellor of the exchequer said debt relief was essential to lifting countries out of poverty.

"We will ask other countries to follow and we will continue the campaign until we succeed so that there is debt relief for all the poor countries of the world," the chancellor said.

In making his points, the chancellor recalled passionately the meetings he had with AIDS orphans and children who were too poor to attend school during his visit to Africa in January 2005.

"Our cause requires more than a week's work at Gleneagles, it requires a lifetime's work crusading for social justice," Brown said.

At Gleneagles, the heads of the Group of Eight leading industrial countries backed a 50-billion-dollar increase in annual development aid, including 25 billion dollars for Africa, by 2010.

The aid increases were combined with debt write-offs and a push for universal access to AIDS treatment but the G8 failed to set a target date for eliminating European and US export subsidies that undercut African farmers.

"We must put an end to what people in the poorest countries rightly see as the hypocrisy of developing countries' protectionism," Brown said, urging the reform of trade laws.

"And we must be honest with ourselves about the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the poorest of the world."

The CAP provides billions of dollars in subsidies to European farmers.

He said he believed there should be "no more procrastination, no more delays, no more excuses" and the European Union and the United States should work with India, Brazil and developing countries towards fair trade.

He also called for providing free elementary education to every child in Africa and the developing world, which he described as "the best and most cost-effective investment the world could ever make."

Calling poverty "the greatest evil of our time," Brown said: "We can build the greatest moral crusade of our time."